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what fraction of those polled have any comprehension of the legal/logical reasoning involved in these types of decisions? Most simply look at a result of a case, compare it to how they believe it should have been decided, and do so without ever having attempted to understand the presented reasoning.

This poll would imply very little about what's actually going on in judicial reasoning even if everyone did understand it all. Given that very few do, it implies even less.

This poll tells you much more about the American people than it does about the Supreme Court, but I think it's still valuable because of what it tells us about the people. It's happened before that the federal and state governments have disagreed with the Court to the extent that they just openly defy what it says, and that becomes much more likely to occur if people think that the Court isn't being a proper arbiter.

their political persuasions play into the their theories on jurisprudence, the breadth of the constitution, etc; politics and the law are certainly intertwined, but personally, as a law student, I think most of the Justices do a as good a job as humanly possible trying to keep pure politics out of their decisions.

I'm pretty confident that the justices are intellectually capable enough to manage their "partisan political views" when considering the constitutionality of the ACA, being as though it's fundamental to the profession of being a judge (or even a good lawyer). Also, it doesn't hurt to mention that the justices have the most prestigious and exclusive responsibilities of the judicial system, so I don't really doubt their professionalism.

Most Americans don't even know what the individual mandate really is, and probably have no understanding of the constitution's commerce clause. Despite my support for many of the ACA's provisions, such as the state health exchanges to be set up by 2014 and the shared savings program for medicare/medicaid ACOs, I believe that the individual mandate will and should be declared unconstitutional by the justices. It has nothing to do with my political beliefs. Rather, I don't think the commerce clause makes the provision for congress to mandate individuals into commerce that doesn't already exist. If that power does exist within the constitution, it's certainly not at the federal level. States reserve the right to manage the health and finances of their citizens, and the individual mandate is a pretty textbook example of the federal government exceeding it's enumerated powers.

Luckily, the rest of the ACA's provisions will probably be upheld by the justices. There is a considerable amount of depth to this legislation, so Americans believing the justices are simply acting on their "partisan political views" just shows their misunderstanding of the essential issues.

And the 200+ years of the court's existence and record of behavior means nothing to you? They've maintained their professionalism as is expected of them, and there's no reason for them to throw that away on this issue.

Then, if not out of fearing of being "fired", what is their driving force? Petty party politics, like this poll implies is clearly not it. They have no worry of elections or of being removed from office. They won't get riches from their office nor very much fame. They will only be judged by history and have achieved the greatest office that their profession has to offer. The only pursuit, besides being good judges, that one can assume they have is their own legacy and anyone who has been appointed to the Supreme Court surely has read enough history to realize that bias, demagoguery or bigotry does not produce good legacies.

This is, as the founders intended, the perfect environment for professionalism.

What else are they supposed to do? When it comes down to an issue like this, where both sides have great arguments for the law's constitutionality/ unconstitutionality, what else are they supposed to do? They have to go with which side they agree with.

Yeah, I'm just not with you on this one. The Court expresses a type of arrogance, and self-satisfaction in its opinions that would be obscene in any scientific publication.

Furthermore, we haven't yet agreed-upon an adequate definition of "truth" which I was casually using as a shorthand for "the way things are." And in the modality of American Jurisprudence, the Court's opinions are "the way things are," until the Court decides they aren't.

there are different "truths". e.g. free expression promotes the idea of truth in a market place of ideas in the sense that the value of the speech shouldn't matter because it ALL speech is important when trying to ascertain "truth". One of the justices (i can't remember which one right now) said the best way to find truth is permit falsity so that the falsity may be rebutted with facts and arguments revealing the truth. Objective facts are used in law to support and discover a general truth, but one problem is that we can't rely simply on "facts" because as facts in legal opinions themselves dictate, facts must be applied to context. That's why attorneys have to analogize and distinguish cases, because objective facts might lead to different truths in various contexts.

haha i love this. my con law prof is always saying stuff like "is this the rule the court will apply in the future? yes, but only until the supreme court decides not to." - see Brennan's view v. Stevens' view on the scope of free expression

It would be terrible if they acknowledged this. Even though the legal realists are basically right that judges tend to rule in favor of their policy preferences, the fact that they are restricted to a very specific legal framework (i.e. textual interpretation and stare decisis) to justify their decisions means that, unless your name is Stephen Reinhardt, your decision is still circumscribed by what is legally plausible.

If the Court were to shed all pretenses of this, they would stop explaining their decisions, and their decisions would be far more arbitrary and political, which is not very palatable for an unelected, life-term official. Under our current framework, there are actually many examples of judges and justices not ruling in favor of their policy preferences.

Well, you could read failure to comply with the mandate as a tax, in which case the mandate falls in line with decades of Commerce Clause rulings. Or if you're just going off what the Constitution explicitly says, you could justify the individual mandate through the Taxing and Spending Clause, depending how you read that in the absence of Supreme Court rulings.

For what I think must be purely political reasons, the Obama administration doesn't want to call it a tax on people without health insurance (though that's just what I gather from the reporting, having not had the time or inclination to read the transcripts).

Also, begging the question means arguing something from the assumption that it's true. It's not a synonym for "raises the question".

Except the legislation doesn't mention the word tax at any point in time. It calls it a penalty; the plaintiffs certainly don't want to call it a tax.

Current law provides that tax law can only be challenged in court once someone has been made to pay the tax and thus 'damaged' by it. If the plaintiffs call it a tax, the case will get thrown out until 2014 at the earliest when the mandate actually starts to go into effect. Instead, the plaintiffs' legal council has been calling it a 'penalty' just like the wording in the legislation. The defense can't call it a tax because the legislation says penalty and not a tax.

I agree with your initial statement that this decision will come down to Commerce, but also Necessary and Proper as well. Both Scalia and Alito love Necessary and Proper.

You can read the Constitution, you will not find any authority for the Federal gov to mandate citizens to purchase anything.

I have read the Constitution along with being a very avid hobbyist when it comes to analyzing the Supreme Court's history and regardless of whether or not someone disagrees with the individual mandate, it would be ignorant to totally disregard years of decisions that the Supreme Court has made on the Commerce clause as well as what the Constitution actually says regarding the Commerce and Necessary and Proper clauses as you have done so in this post.

The defenses' argument will be such:

When a person without health insurance gets sick, they go to the emergency room for treatment. Hospitals that have emergency rooms do such so they can receive federal subsidies. The bill for emergency room patients who don't pay up is footed by federal subsidies. Therefore, since uninsured people are costing the federal government money and thus substantially affecting interstate commerce, they can regulate who has insurance and who doesn't. Additionally, they could use the Necessary and Proper clause to further argue their claim; the mandate is a necessary and proper course of action to assist with lowering federal health care costs.

If we were back in the mid-1990s right after Lopez had been decided, I would totally agree with you. I would be in your corner. However, a bunch of decisions including Gonzales v Raich have done nothing, but expand federal powers to regulate commerce. Additionally, two of the justices that dissented in Gonzales are now off the bench replaced by Kagan, an Obama-appointed justice and Roberts, a very moderate and level-headed conservative; Roberts is a wild card in other words.

Another thing to consider is that they'll be using cases such as Gonzales as precedent which dealt with both Commerce and Necessary and Proper. Essentially, if they rule against the mandate based on Commerce, they could unintentionally weaken Gonzales and thus pave the way for legal cannabis; no one on the court right now wants to do that.

All of this being said, I don't support the individual mandate of health insurance because a single-payer system is far more efficient and more easily argued on a constitutional basis. Both Switzerland and Massachusetts have had an individual mandate in place for years and have experienced some success coupled with skyrocketing costs due to how the health insurance industry inherently operates.

The Supreme Court has long subscribed to Alexander Hamilton's interpretation of the General Welfare clause and his interpretation makes it clear that single-payer would be allowed. To overturn such a law would overturn every single case of the last 200 years that dealt with tax code and the General Welfare clause. That is monumentally unlikely.

in trying to take an objective approach to this issue right now, the fact that anything pertaining to health care could be unconstitutional if its purpose is covering everyone, then that says more about the quality of US society than anything else.

What I don't like about it is that it's getting so astoundingly convoluted that actually implementing these policies will be astronomically difficult. Many insurers, like cigna for example, are reorganizing to expand affordable coverage to new markets even without the law going through.

I'm admittedly more business-oriented but my first couple degrees were in the sciences and I have a moral problem with monetizing health as a bought-in commodity. A more efficient model, with superior outcomes at lower costs can be seen in any other developed nation to some extent. There are problems everywhere, but sometimes it's okay. This is again, my personal opinion.

I am definitely interested in how Kennedy decides; he has been pretty progressive in his usage of international law when deciding cases like this. If he looks at models like Switzerland or Germany, I could see him saying, "Oh hey, okay." Both of those nations do pretty much what the Affordable Health Care Act seeks to do and what Massachusetts has been doing since Romney pioneered the American model of mandated health insurance.

The legislation is huge, and only a small part of it is even in question. There's no need to read the rest, and neither party has suggested it needs to be read. In ruling on a tax case, you don't ask the Supreme Court to read the entire tax code.